Important New Books on Fashion in Museums from Yale

The pace of fashion publishing continues to impress me. When I was in graduate school, new and important fashion history books were few and far between. But now, it’s hard to keep up! Yale Press, in particular, continues to set the bar high for new and necessary books for the fashion historians library. Aside from the new Charles James: Beyond Fashion from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition in New York (a MUST have and a MUST see, if you can), there are a few others that you might not have heard about. Elegance in an Age of Crisis: Fashions of the 1930s, edited by Patricia Mears, is an excellent resource and documents the recently closed exhibition from the Museum at FIT (Nadine Stewarts review of that show is available here).

Exhibiting Fashion: Before and after 1971 by Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye is an extremely important work for the field, and something that has been needed for quite some time. It chronicles the work of curators such as James Laver (1899-1975), Doris Langley Moore (1902-1989) and Anne Buck (1910-2005) in several case studies. It also discusses, at length, the importance of Fashion:An Anthology the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert by Cecil Beaton in 1971,

Additionally, it provides an admittedly incomplete inventory of fashion exhibitions since 1971. While Lou Taylor’s book, Establishing Dress History does much to document fashion collections and their history in text, Clark and de la Hayes’ book not only discusses the history of exhibitions of fashion, but does so in an oversized, illustrated volume (including photos of historic exhibition catalogs, as well as installation photos).

The inventory of exhibitions focuses primarily on major exhibits from England, Australia, France, Canada, and the United States (although a few from the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Germany, Belgium are also included). The U.S. exhibits listed were held primarily in New York and Philadelphia; though it does also list some from Boston; Kent, OH; Saint Paul, MN; Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (It doesn’t begin listing exhibits from the de Young until the year 2000 and The Museum at FIDM’s first listing is in 2003). My feeling is that this book leaves the door open for further work on the history of fashion collection and exhibition in the United States.